Smothering, spiteful 🏠︎
"Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else."
—George Orwell
> a fifth of vodka | no control
"I couldn't change if I wanted to," a man at Alcoholics Anonymous said simply one night.
My own drinking had led to smothering, spiteful hangovers.
But with no spouse or kids or mortgage, a hangover wasn't going to stop me from producing a new one to smother the old one.🍸
- Sometimes I waited in the parking lot of the liquor store before it opened.
- "It's like a job keeping drunk," said a woman at AA.
I came up with every imaginable excuse over the years to justify drinking again. In Alcoholics Anonymous, we call this "rationalizing in order to justify."
After a while, I bothered less and less to even give myself excuses.
A study in 2020 described alcoholism as "an imbalance between automatic, implicit, and controlled (conscious) processes in the human mind."
It's the powerful implicit, unconscious mind that often gets overlooked when we're trying to understand addiction.
Cognitive cues nudge an addict to drink or use. It's not mind control. But it's much more difficult to control than non-addicts fully realize. Wrote researchers in 2005:
- "The frequent failure of substance abusers to control their abusive behavior has led researchers to conclude that substance use is uncontrollable."
Eventually, I reached a bleak chapter in my alcoholism sometimes referred to by experts as "drinking without thinking."
Once cravings have been unleashed in an addict, it can feel virtually impossible to resist them. They grind away at your impulse control all day long, and it's easy to lose the fight against them. I have many times.
Family may not be enough to prevent a relapse. But they'll have opinions to share nonetheless:
>> "She needs Jesus."
>> "She needs prison."
>> "She needs kombucha."
>> "She needs to mind her gut health."
>> "She needs to go to bed earlier."
>> "She needs to drink more water."
>> "She needs to stop watching all that true crime."
>> "She only cares about herself."
- next time "I began to wake up in parks."
- listening Bjork "Joga"
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